I’ve said before that I tend not to write about books I haven’t enjoyed reading. If I were a book reviewer I might feel a sense of responsibility to warn readers about books that they might want to avoid. But these posts aren’t reviews and I’m not inclined to spend time writing about books I didn’t like. Sometimes, of course, I feel I ought to give a book a second chance, perhaps because I don’t believe it can be as bad as I remember, or because I suspect that I didn’t give it my full attention first time around.

I almost never write about a book here without having read it at least twice, so if I do end up posting something about a book I didn’t enjoy first time around that’s probably because I appreciated it better on second reading. Liz Nugent’s fourth novel, Our Little Cruelties (2020), doesn’t quite fit that pattern.

Before I got to it, I’d written favourably about her first three novels, Unravelling Oliver, Lying in Wait and Skin Deep. I had very few reservations about any of these three but was surprised, the next time I took a load of books to the Oxfam shop, to find that I never expected to read Skin Deep again, so it went with them.

I thought it was possible that my perception of Our Little Cruelties was coloured by the fact that I first read it as an ebook borrowed from the library. (The ereader app used by the library is Borrowbox, an irritating mess. I’ve deleted the app.) Recently I found a secondhand trade paperback, which is where I reread the book.

Our Little Cruelties consists of the alternating first-person narratives of the three Drumm brothers, the Dublin-born sons of a retired showband singer and actor, Melissa Drumm. Will is the eldest. He exhibits a sense of entitlement and is used to getting (and taking) what he wants. In the course of the story, he becomes a successful film producer. Early on, when someone makes the mistake of saying that he wants to be a film director, Will is dismissive. Directors, he says, are just technicians for hire. Producers are the ones with the power and the money. They’re in control. So much for auteur theory.

The youngest brother is Luke. Unlike the other two, who graduate from UCD with Arts degrees, Luke doesn’t finish his engineering degree and instead becomes an initially very successful pop star, with two hit albums and his own house (with no mortgage) by the age of 20. But Luke has lifelong mental health difficulties, in particular bipolar disorder, and he becomes an alcoholic, finding it impossible to maintain his early career success.

The middle brother, Brian, becomes a teacher first, then later takes over the management of what’s left of Luke’s career, before moving into artist management more generally. Brian’s most obvious characteristic is that he’s a skinflint. He sells stories to the press about Luke’s excesses and eccentric behaviour, to make some extra money, and he somehow ends up owning and living in Luke’s house, while his younger brother and client lives in a rented flat. He has always loved Susan, Will’s wife, and believes that he may be the biological father of Daisy, Susan’s daughter, who was conceived before Will and Susan were married. Late in the story, he has a DNA test done and confirms his suspicions. He hadn’t done it earlier because he didn’t want to take financial responsibility for Daisy’s upbringing.

Will was always Melissa’s favourite child. As far as she’s concerned, he can do no wrong. Early on, she insists that Will doesn’t tell lies, an assertion the reader already knows to be false. Luke, in contrast, is constantly aware that his mother has never liked him or taken him seriously. The brothers, the two older ones in particular, cheat and repeatedly betray each other. Luke isn’t devious but he can be insensitive to the concerns of the others. When Will asks him for a loan to help get his film production business of the ground, Luke merely says that it’s not the kind of project that interests him.

Much later, with Luke’s pop stardom long in the past, Will takes a measure of revenge when Luke asks him to cast him in a small role (DI Maeve Kerrigan’s father in an adaptation of one of Jane Casey’s books). Will says he only casts real, professional actors. (Eventually, Luke will be nominated for an Oscar, for his performance in a film produced by a rival of Will’s.) In the meantime, though, Will has done something much worse: he has paid and coerced Luke’s pregnant fiancée, Kate, to have an abortion, pretend she miscarried and disappear permanently from Luke’s life. Luke’s mental health had been improving since he met Kate and it goes into a nosedive again after she leaves.

As one expects from a book by Liz Nugent, the characters are cruel, selfish (almost to the point of solipsism), blinkered and not to be trusted. But, unlike those in her earlier novels, they’re also not very interesting. That’s one of the problems with the book. The other has to do with the way the story is told. As I’ve mentioned, we get the first-person narratives of the three brothers: first Will, next Luke and Brian. Then there’s a final part, made up of alternating short passages all set in the years 2017/2018 — almost the “present day” of the story — by each of the three brothers, culminating in a two-page coda in the voice of Daisy, Will’s presumptive and Brian’s biological daughter. Like Luke, Daisy has mental health difficulties and she shares with him his mother’s (her grandmother’s) musical talent.

In this final part, the telling of the story becomes chronological, which it certainly hasn’t been previously. The main narrative of each of the brothers jumps around in time. Will’s starts in 1994 (Daisy’s birth), then jumps to 1985 (their father’s death), 1992, 1978, 1999, 1983, 1998 and so on. Luke’s and Brian’s accounts are similar, though the dates are not necessarily the same, or in the same order. I assume that the effect of this is to show us the consequences or effects of a plot development before we’re aware of the development itself, but I haven’t bothered to work my way through the story noting where the timeline disruptions have introduced a new surprise. My unverified impression is that the story wouldn’t have suffered from being related linearly.

I don’t mean to imply that on this account the plot was hard to follow. I didn’t feel that I’d missed anything of consequence. But I was puzzled as to why Nugent took this approach. After two readings, that’s not clear to me and I don’t expect that there’ll be a third, but time will tell.

My disappointment with Our Little Cruelties didn’t discourage me from reading Nugent’s subsequent novel, Strange Sally Diamond (2023). This is another story made up of alternating first-person narratives but this time each of the narratives is in chronological order. Sally’s part of the narrative is for the most part contemporary, beginning in 2017 with the death of her adoptive father, Tom Diamond, when Sally is 43. The other narrator is Peter, whose account begins in 1974, shortly before Sally’s birth, and continues up to 2020.

The reader learns long before Sally does that she and Peter are siblings. Their father was Conor Geary, a dentist with a lucrative practice and a large house in Glenageary, south County Dublin. Geary was a misogynist and paedophile who kidnapped Denise Norton when she was 11 years old and kept her half-starved and locked in a windowless room for the next fourteen years. Denise gave birth to Peter when she was 12 and to Sally seven years later. Geary took Peter away from her as soon as he was weaned, as he wanted to raise the boy himself, but had no interest in his daughter.

Once separated from his mother, Peter had no contact with her for the first seven years of his life. His father told him that the voices emanating from the locked room were those of a ghost. When he is locked in the room with her over a weekend, he behaves viciously, believing that his father has encouraged this:

I said nothing, but I put on my clothes quickly and tied my shoelaces, before I went over and kicked her as hard as I could with my leather shoes, repeatedly, in the face, in the head, in her fat belly. She rolled herself into a ball, whimpering and crying. Dad was right. She knew I was in charge now. She didn’t try to talk to me again for ages. She got under her blanket and sobbed there, and every so often she would cry out in pain.

I shouted at her to shut up. (p. 103)

Sally is born not long afterwards.

When Denise and Sally are found, Conor Geary flees the country with Peter, whose birth has never been registered and who has never attended school. The authorities who are pursuing Geary don’t even suspect that Peter exists. The fugitives can get to London without documents; there Geary is able to buy forged New Zealand passports. In New Zealand, Geary kidnaps another child. Lindy Weston is 14 but she looks younger. Geary is killed in a car crash five years after her kidnapping but Lindy is not freed. Peter refuses to let her go and she spends another 25 years in captivity, before dying of appendicitis. During that time, Peter impregnates her and then abandons her baby at the entrance to a cathedral.

Tom Diamond was the psychiatrist in charge of the unit where Denise and her daughter (then known as Mary) were treated. His wife, Jean, was a GP who was also involved in the treatment. For a year, Denise clung to her daughter and refused to be apart from her. Tom and Jean felt that it was increasingly necessary for Mary’s development to separate her from her mother but when they tried this Denise killed herself by violently beating her head against a stone wall.

It was agreed that the Diamonds should adopt the child. Tom retired from his position and Jean took over a remote general practice in rural County Roscommon, where the newly renamed Sally lived with hardly any social contact until Tom’s death. Jean had died when Sally was 18.

The adoptive parents had disagreed about Sally’s upbringing. Jean believed that Sally had autism and needed to be socialized. She wanted Sally to go to university. Tom disagreed. He insisted that Sally’s condition was not autism, and that it was best to keep her at home and protect her from social interactions that she would not easily adapt to. Jean’s death meant that Tom’s views prevailed. In a letter to be read by Sally after his death, Tom had written:

You could have been diagnosed with anxiety disorder or PTSD. Some might even have said you had Autistic Spectrum Disorder, or that you had an attachment disorder. The fact is that you are a bit odd, that’s all.

… Your behaviour has always been inconsistent. It is not bad. But you don’t fit any diagnosis of which I am aware. (pp. 50–1)

After his death, Sally began to get on well with some of the local people, many of whom remembered what had happened to Denise and Mary Norton. She did a computer course, got work playing the piano in a hotel, sold the isolated house where she had lived since the age of 7 and bought one in the village, threw a party and made friends. Ultimately, though, after two or three autistic-style meltdowns which showed her capacity for violence, she found herself isolated again and drinking heavily, ignored by the people who had been willing to help and befriend her, but only up to a point.

The ending of the story is rather dispiriting but it seems to me realistic. I’ve sometimes noticed that even very well meaning, fully informed people who know what to expect can still become extremely angry at autistic behaviour, as if they’re reacting instinctively rather than rationally. That seems to be what’s happening here, though Aunt Christine’s withdrawal is largely motivated by an understandable fear of physical violence on Sally’s part.

A recurring theme in Nugent’s fiction is the damage that parents do to their offspring. Oliver, the monstrous author of delightful children’s books in the first novel, is the unloved and rejected son of a former Catholic priest and has had a miserable, neglected childhood. In the end, he cuts his own daughter loose, assuring her that he couldn’t possibly be her father. This may be the nearest he can come to protecting her from his (and her) heritage. Lydia, the mother in the second novel, is another monster who destroys her son’s life. But she, of course, was fucked up in her turn.

Skin Deep’s Delia is the daughter of a family annihilator who has groomed her for a role that ceased to exist centuries earlier. She almost kills and badly disfigures her own son, for whom she cares nothing. In Our Little Cruelties, Melissa’s understandable dislike of her youngest son and her excessive attachment to her eldest contribute something to the family’s dysfunction. And the harm done by Conor Geary in the most recent novel is surely obvious. His son Peter, now with a new identity, finishes up in New Mexico where he has bought a house “way up a dirt track off a road that you wouldn’t know existed” (p. 357). He’s planning to build a soundproofed barn and kidnap a woman. “She won’t be a child. I’m not my father” (p. 357). But they share some characteristics.

Tom, the adoptive father, hasn’t acted out of malevolence and certainly hasn’t done nearly as much damage, but he may have done some. Sally’s Aunt Christine, Jean’s sister, didn’t like Tom and may not be being scrupulously fair when she tells Sally:

“Jean was a lot more intelligent than your dad. She strongly objected to the way he treated you. She said he never saw you as a daughter, but as a patient. He experimented on you, trying out different treatments and medications, evaluating everything. When you left school, Jean was adamant that you should go to college. You had brains to burn and you could have studied anything, music obviously, but she thought you’d be a good engineer too. You have a very mathematical mind. You didn’t want to do anything.” (p. 348)

However he may have felt when she was younger, there is little doubt that by the time he died Tom had come to see Sally as a daughter, not as a patient or an experiment.

Editions: Our Little Cruelties, Penguin Ireland trade paperback, 2020; Strange Sally Diamond, Penguin paperback, 2024.